The Critical Success Factors Report is the North Carolina Community College System's major accountability document. This annual performance report is based on data compiled from the previous year and serves to inform colleges and the public on the performance of North Carolina's 58 community colleges. In 1993, the State Board of Community Colleges…

This brief addresses the state policy dimensions of college readiness. It identifies the key issues and problems associated with the college readiness gap, which is a major impediment to increasing the numbers of college students who complete certificates or degrees. This policy brief also provides governors, legislators, and state education…

Whereas community colleges and for-profit institutions both provide postsecondary educational opportunities, they are different in a host of dimensions. This brief describes some of those differences--not to win a debate or suggest public policy, but to show why comparisons made between the community colleges and for-profit institutions are more…

This chapter discusses Washington State's Student Achievement Initiative, a new performance funding system for community and technical colleges. Its purposes are to improve public accountability by more accurately describing what students achieve from enrolling in state colleges each year and provide incentives through financial rewards to…

This article describes Washington State's Student Achievement Initiative, an accountability system implemented in 2005-06 that measures students' gains in college readiness, college credits earned, and degree or certificate completion. The goal of the initiative is to increase educational attainment by focusing on the critical momentum points…

The pressures on community colleges have mounted for years; they must balance: competition from the growing for-profit-education industry, demands from lawmakers for more accountability, and the shifting needs of an increasingly complex student body. Most recently, intense financial pressure has been added to the mix as states once again face…

This article describes the issues addressed at this year's American Association of Community Colleges' annual convention. The discussion centered on student success, including how colleges measure it, promote it, and are held accountable for it. One of the chief concerns expressed at the meeting was the gap between the retention, graduation, and…

Institutional accountability programs may present ethical dilemmas for community college leaders. Some of these dilemmas may be resolved by relying on the authority of the traditional mission. However, in some instances, the mission may be inadequate to check this form of state encroachment. We propose that campus leaders review John Dewey's…

Community colleges operate under much scrutiny these days, and these institutions have experienced a growing emphasis on performance indicators as paths to institutional accountability. California's system of 109 community colleges recently developed and implemented an innovative accountability program that used peer group comparison as one of its…

"Accountability" has become something of a 2008 buzzword, tossed about in all kinds of contexts and all sorts of industries. Sparked partially by politics and partially by a business environment peppered with scandal, the accountability bug is everywhere, from local banks to technology firms to, most recently, the nation's institutions of higher…

The Critical Success Factors Report is the North Carolina Community College System's major accountability document. This annual performance report serves to inform colleges and the public on the performance of North Carolina's 58 community colleges. In 1993, the State Board of Community Colleges began monitoring performance data on specific…

The purpose of this study was to understand, through nontraditional student perspectives, how institutional practices of postsecondary proprietary schools may influence the success of moderately to highly nontraditional students. The study was undertaken for these reasons: (a) A large and growing number of higher education students are…

This study included an analysis of the trend of performance indicators for the technical college sector of higher education in South Carolina. In response to demands for accountability and transparency in higher education, the state of South Carolina developed sector specific performance indicators to measure various educational outcomes for each…

Three years after U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spelling's national commission on higher education, and nearly a decade after No Child Left Behind revolutionized k-12 accountability, there is little agreement on what accountability in higher education should look like. While more students are enrolling in (and failing to complete)…

A policy sociology approach is taken to examine the connections between neo-liberalism, post-secondary provincial education (PSE) policy in Canada and the impact of those policies. Our thesis regarding the broad political economy of PSE is that over the last two decades the adoption of this ideology has been a major cause of some dramatic changes…